RichP714

People that enjoy vinyl are, usually, enamored by the non-linearities introduced by the mechanical effects of dragging a cantilever through plastic; that effect occurs irrespective of the source material.

A nice Sunday Afternoon tune:

Yeah, this stuff is crazy; total exposure with no buffer between your flesh and the ground.

I think Michael covered this in the clip I posted? Also, Dr. Hoffman brings up the issue in his video, and both seem to be indicating that the construct of a societal 'reality' has to exist, and other 'conscious agents' (as Hoffman puts it) are vital to the framework of reality. Couldn't it go the other way as well? It seems a very narcissist friendly ideology, and narcissists tend to be very ambitious?

Did you get the special edition set?

Thanks for posting this; Hoffman's ideas are fairly exotic, but (I think) reasonable.

Or is it all just phaneron?

"If your first reaction is defensiveness or to attack or insult, I know you can’t support your position." ~ S.B.N.

Now on Gaia and Prime: The enigma of psychedelic use tugs at the curiosity of those seeking to connect with the source of consciousness. Since the earliest days of shamanic initiation to the dawning of a new era of spiritual evolution, psychedelic plants have been thought of as the initiators of expanded consciousness.

If you understand sound waves, you understand quantum uncertainty.

Maybe that's why it's called 'programming'. Yes, I agree, this show's intention is to garner interest, and to point to references for further exploration; for the actual supporting math, one would have to take action; this show aims to motivate that action, and so does 'The Outer Rim' I think if it stuck only to hard truths and math, it would not meet its goal of expanding interest. Yes, currently unverifiable, but epiphanys happen. The Inflaton field theory at least tries to approach the brick wall from a different perspective. If we manage to discover a method for measuring scalar fields directly (rather than our current method of having to detect a particle interaction), then new science will emerge; some of which is very likely to be observable.

Here's a writeup that may be of interest: Inflation and Scalar Fields

neat party trick; turns causality on its ear

Sure, and this idea doesn't intend to replace any of the Unified Field Theory attempts; it recognizes that you can only look back in time 'so far' (down to the planck length, which is pretty fantastic) to see what came 'before' and approaches things from the other side of the wall. It was a new idea to me as well, but it's not really more complicated or inscrutable as looking for ever more short lived and exotic particles in the early universe; the standard model has enough of that. It's all just people with math skills trying to curve fit with what's observable, looking for purchase in the soil of many different thought vectors. I'd rather read about that than how Amazon doesn't pay any corporate taxes.

Did you catch the part about self-induced fluctuations? Somewhat like self-induction in electronics. In this idea, the inflaton field (being a scalar field, like the Higgs field) self-induces what they call 'low roll inflation'; this happens of its own accord. Similarly, the Higgs field tugs away at energy, giving it mass. The inflaton field doesn't have to have a beginning or end (which fits the idea that inflation never stopped, it just slowed WAY down); It's the 'let there be light' moment. The nature of the inflaton field is that of pure massless energy, just waiting for the right self-induction to happen. If you think that the multi-verse is on the right track, then one way for it to happen is this see-saw idea. In it, a Universe's black hole's singularity (which is the end of matter for THAT universe) dumps into a new Universe's white hole singularity. It's not that this idea doesn't explain ANYTHING; it does fit several ideas about singularities and white holes, but there are other violations to the idea. I'm not versed enough to say whether theses violations prove the idea is a dead end (sometimes there's an epiphany that changes everything in Physics), but it is an idea. A ping pong idea, yes, but that alone doesn't rule it out. Your extra-dimensional collision idea sounds very much like m-brane theory; positing that two 'branes' came into contact and sprouted the Universe. I tend to like that idea as well, although most of it is based on unobservable ideas (currently unobservable I should say); the math is very elegant though. Yes, there's a glass ceiling in there somewhere; some questions don't have meaningful answers. I suppose the quest is to get our noses right up against the ceiling to see if we can see anything beyond it; even if its blurry and makes no sense. Headlines about ANYTHING are always disappointing; the words allude to something, but the text is filled with caveats and sometimes reversals; That's not limited to talk about physics. I don't read anything with the presumption that 'scientists are trying to sound as if the universe is a solved puzzle', as you say. I don't expect that, and I don't read that into what I hear. The thing I liked about this inflaton field theory is PRECISELY that it abandons the 'chicken-egg' questions and 'particle zoo' theories. It separates itself from the standard model There are two typical responses from a physicists psyche. They tend to either become more aqnostic or more 'pro'gnostic (?) IOW they believe that it's all a bunch of sterile and random shit, or there's an intelligence behind it (in some form). Not all scientists can be rolled into that pigenhole, You brought up cause and effect; You'll LOVE the next video then (bringing up the issue of causality, why the arrow of time marches to causality's drum, and how it can be reversed). I don't think that Hawking came up with the idea of vacuum fluctuations, and I disagree that we all know that scientists don't like the idea. Inflation theory suggests that the tug of virtual particles in otherwise empty space is responsible for the hubble constant. Quantum tunneling, (a known phenomenon that happens, for example, inside simple transistors) depends on virtual particles. That's a neat thing about this inflaton theory; it recognizes the fact that only unobservable assumptions can be had when staring at a blank wall (the universe was opaque to light when it was so tiny and dense, so nothing can be seen of its beginning). This idea abandons all that trying to peer through the CMB; it accepts that the 'big bang' standard model can only be walked back to a certain point before it gives no more traction, and it approaches the known conditions it tries to model from the other direction.

Did you catch the part about the inflaton field? Combined with 'slow roll' inflation, it accounts for how something came from nothing, why it expanded so suddenly and the same math used to describe the inflaton field yields hot dense expanding universes like the one we are in. That seems comprehensive to me. He doesn't get into it specifically (he alludes to it), but one of the inflationary theories (the one that yields empty multi-verses) describes a situation in which the precursor to our universe wasn't an inflaton field, but rather a condensing universe, resulting in the 'big bounce'. That idea isn't as well regarded as inflaton field theory though. There's another idea; that our expanding universe (that began as a singularity) is the 'exhaust port' (white hole) of a black hole (condensing universe). Then there's Hawking's idea; conditions prior to the big bang are undefined (like dividing by zero, or taking a point on earth that is south of the south pole) and therefore meaningless.

Some new ideas that differentiate the Big Bang from inflation, and a bit about (perhaps) why (or at least how)